


Helska Spirit-touched: The Sorceress-Queen

by Saelengil



Category: Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Genre: Gen, Original Character is Not Dovahkiin | Dragonborn, Post-Skyrim Civil War, Skyrim Civil War, biography, not entirely canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-24
Updated: 2021-02-24
Packaged: 2021-03-09 21:40:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 2,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27783133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Saelengil/pseuds/Saelengil
Summary: A biography of Helska Spirit-touched, Sorcess-Queen of Skyrim. By Sigridr Bransdottír, Skald to Ulfric, High King.
Relationships: Ulfric Stormcloak/Original Female Character(s)
Kudos: 3





	1. Author's Note to the Reader

Stories of Skyrim’s Sorceress-Queen are oft repeated, with pride by the Nords and derision by the rest. To the Nords she is a triumph of the Old Ways and an inspiring example of Our power and fortitude. To those outside our lands and those that reject our King, she is a corrupting force of darkness that reaches into the collective conscious of the Nordic people and inspires them to vigorous but misguided rebellion against reason.

The stories are overblown, and in academic circles this downplays the true strength and power of the woman… For what reasonable College-educated academic hears the Edda of Battle Whiterun, in which an invincible army of spirits arrives at her beck and call, and believes it?

As both a College academic and Skald to the High King, I have had the fantastic opportunity to research the true life and deeds of the Sorceress-Queen, in addition to interviewing the woman herself. I have found the truth to be no disappointment compared with the legends, and that at times the two are even – surprisingly – one and the same.

_\-- Sigridr Bransdottír, Skald to Ulfric, High King_


	2. Chapter 2

Helska was born in 4E 183 in the remote village of Lyngwi, which lies atop an icy glacier in the Sea of Ghosts. Her mother’s labour was long and difficult, and it was at the midnight that marked Nocturnal’s holy day (that is, the 3rd of Hearthfire) that the ghost-eyed babe was finally born at the cost of her mother’s life. It was almost as if she had been waiting on Nocturnal’s signal, and that is what the village folk chose to believe. She was given a name fit for a purported bringer of bad omen (the name ‘Helska’ speaks of death to the Nordic mind) and thus began her life.

It is difficult to obtain reliable accounts of this early period of her life, and it is one that the Queen herself prefers not to discuss. It can be gleaned, however, that Helska had already by age 7 begun to experience the prescient visions, flashes of intuition, and spiritual encounters that have since earned her the name ‘Spirit-touched’.

These supernatural manifestations were reviled and rejected by the Lyngwians, along with the girl herself. It is implied that her father shared these views of his own daughter, and all indications are that Helska had an unhappy childhood. At age 12, the home they shared caught fire, and though little Helska managed to wriggle out the loft window, her father remained trapped inside. She tried to save him, failed, and was driven out of the village. The villagers thought her bad luck, and that perhaps she had even committed arson to kill her own sire.

It is worth here noting that nowadays if one travels to Lyngwi and so much as mentions the Sorceress-Queen, its denizens will exude effusive praise of her alongside anecdotes told fondly of her early years. These accounts vary wildly in nearly every way, and it is only after a fortnight or more of bullying and wheedling (both) that one might successfully coax the Lyngwians into discussing Helska’s childhood with anything approaching honesty.

~~~

Lyngwi is surrounded by frigid water, and though Helska was able to escape the villagers’ wrath by hiding in an icy cavern, she needed a way off the island. She recounts that after waiting for many freezing hours that seemed like days, she was able to steal a boat and make the crossing to the mainland. By this time it was nearly morning, and shortly after making landfall Helska collapsed from exhaustion and the cold; most likely somewhere north of Dawnstar. She awoke some days later in the city itself, lying feverish on some furs beside the hearth of the Windpeak Inn. The locals recall her as a scrawny child clad in ill-fitting clothes, who was carried into town by a hooded man they’d never seen before and never saw again.

The elderly tavernkeeper Thoring took pity on the child, and she was allowed to remain by his hearth and eat of his food; as charity at first, then later in return for cleaning dishes of which there were rarely many. As Helska regained her strength, she was able to scrape a living by doing other odd jobs around town. But as soon as she could afford a hunting knife, she fled into the wilderness, terrified of people and certain she would soon overstay her welcome.

Nowadays Thoring's daughter, Karita, has the pelt of a sabre cat hung proudly upon her wall, and claims it to be the one slept on by the young Queen-to-be. One wonders how she knew to save it all these years.


	3. Chapter 3

Surviving the Pale’s wilderness is difficult in the best of times, and these were far from the best for Helska. She was new to the knife she carried, and had no bow for hunting. She bore no furs, had barely any food, and lacked shelter. But the girl named after death refused to die.

She found a ruin in which to shelter, foraged mushrooms and moss, and scavenged meat from half-eaten beasts abandoned by their original hunters. When she tells me of this time, she says that her biggest concerns were always these: to avoid people, to keep the fire burning, and to learn to hunt for herself… before she starved.

It was admittedly not an illustrious start to our Queen’s journey, but one has to start somewhere.

She had met and befriended a young man in Dawnstar, and when she fled the town into the wilderness he followed her. Alesan was brave, and strong in his own way, and protected her from threats the Queen suspects she never knew.

But Alesan was also a ghost, the first in a long line of Nirn-bound spirits that Helska would come to know and, eventually, free. She says that he is the one who first taught her to tame the awful din in her mind from the many lesser spirits, always clamoring for her attention.

One marvels that Helska held on to sanity for the twelve years of life that went before. One also comes to understand, perhaps, why people thought she hadn’t.

~~~

Weeks became months, and young Helska learned how to stalk elk over the snowy plains. She fended off wolves with her dagger and Alesan’s aid. She fashioned a bow, and taught herself to use it. She clothed herself and her shelter in warm furs, and found that the spirits she spoke to happily bound themselves to her protection. It was a willing form of what most of us call ‘enchantment’, and they whispered amongst themselves that now they served a purpose. When their energy was spent they would leave Nirn, fulfilled.

It is worth here noting that the High Queen finds the standard practice of enchantment, in which souls are tricked and forced into powering an object’s magic, abhorrible and akin to enslavement.

Months approached a year, and Helska began to brave Dawnstar again; when she had furs to trade for salt and other supplies. She was more confident in herself and her place in the world; the spirit voices were quieted, and the wounds left by her village’s abuse had begun to heal over. But despite coming to town only for business and avoiding its folk, people began whispering about her strangeness, and the strange things that would happen in her presence. Helska was, as she is now, an attractive flame for lost souls; and spirits have an effect on the waking world that even the uninitiated can perceive. When a local woman named Beitild was murdered in her sleep, you can guess who people blamed. Never mind that she had enemies of her own, one of whom was rumored to have pursued the Black Sacrament.

The next time Helska returned to Dawnstar, she was driven away. It was then that, for a time, Helska turned her eye upon the South. She was thirteen.


	4. Chapter 4

Our Queen’s first transcribed prophecies and documented visions occurred in Whiterun, which is where her wanderings took her after she left the Pale behind. She knew that the further south she went, the warmer the land would become, and her original intent was to go all the way to Falkreath Hold. Her foray into Whiterun city was intended only as a supply stop.

Those plans were quite upset when there, right beside the Gildergreen, the scrawny ghost-eyed girl was struck by a fit of spastic shakes that wrested control of her body from her and must have been alarming to lookers-on. When she finally stopped trembling, she babbled with fright about the ‘Great Bear’ coming and ‘Kyne’s tree’ dying and the city burning by blue flame. Nobody knew it at the time, but she had just foreseen Battle Whiterun.

In any case, it wasn’t long before the city folk descended upon her in a fear-fueled frenzy of heckling and hurled stone. It was the Jarl himself that saved her.

~~~

Balgruuf the Greater is the perfect counterpoint to our own High King. A true Nord who managed for some time to balance a political allegiance to the Empire with his personal belief in the Old Gods and the Old Ways. The nature of his relationship with our Queen has been subject to much speculation and more than a little libel and slander.

The truth is that he stumbled upon this scrawny child being beaten and stoned by the Gildergreen, and upon hearing of what she’d spoken, invited the girl into his home. He suspected a truth to her words when few others did, and regardless took pity upon her. Her presence in his home lent her some credibility, and her existence became known to certain circles within Skyrim – though her name did not always spread as far as the rumors. It is during this time that some came to call her Spirit-touched in name and Seiðkona in title. Her visions and fits were documented, and though many burned in the war, a few originals remain to be viewed with permission in Dragonsreach.

The Queen insists that in the brief time his roof sheltered her, the Jarl treated her as his own child; and one is forced to wonder how close the course of the war came to swinging quite another way.

~~~

In 4E 197, during the great feast of Harvest’s End, Helska prophesied again. In front of the Jarl’s illustrious guests, including an obligatory Thalmor delegation, the girl babbled of a king’s death and a voice that could tear through armor and touch the sky. The Thalmor, of course, with their rejection of the Old Ways, insisted that her words were pure treason and designed to incite murderous intent against then High King Torygg. It is said that the Jarl objected but that in the end, unwilling to jeopardize Whiterun’s safety, he agreed to her execution.

Late in the night that was to be her last, the girl’s cell was unlocked by a mysteriously hooded figure. He gave her a cloak, a dagger, and a ring of Whiterun; and ushered her out of the city. So it was that Helska Spirit-touched came to be alone with the wilderness again.

As you know, this was far from the end of her story.


	5. Chapter 5

Helska’s exile from Whiterun hold may not have been the end of her story, but it did mark her disappearance from public record for the rest of second century. By the Queen’s own account, the fourteen-year-old Seiðkona travelled south to Falkreath first, then east to the Rift. After that, even she loses track, and says only that she wandered Skyrim province for years from village to village.

You may recall from Chapter Two that this was not the first time she wandered so. The Queen says that this second adolescent period of living away from civilization was so formative that even now she sometimes feels more at home in the wilderness here in the City of Kings.

In some villages, those closer to the Old Ways, she gained a reputation as Seiðkona. Those, she returned to more often, sometimes even resting within-doors as honored guest. Other communities reviled her as a witch, and she avoided them. Still others never knew her more than once, or as anything other than a strange young woman of the wilds, who would infrequently come to trade furs or trinkets for salt and other necessities.

~~~

Nowadays, one can travel to these villages and ask about our Queen. Many do not recognize that title as referring to the rough-skinned teenager that walked their muddy streets. But those few that observed her Gift in action – those unsettling fits and strangely-spoken riddles – rarely forget the experience. As a result, there is a living record of Helska’s sayings over these lost years.

Notably, certain elements recurred again and again in Helska’s visions: a king’s death, a rending voice, the ‘great bear’ and, less frequently, blue fire. In hindsight, we know these elements for what they are: the death of King Torygg, a _thu’um_ , our present High King Ulfric, and the Queen’s own Gift – when turned to destructive purpose. But as Helska approached adulthood, she did _not_ know what these visions were. And as her eighteenth summer approached, the frequency of these visions became debilitating. She began to babble of the ‘king’s city’, over and over and over again. Witnesses thought she meant Solitude, perhaps.

But Helska thought she meant Windhelm, and so there she went. Helska wanted answers to these terrifying visions of hers, and the _old_ City of Kings seemed more likely to have them than the Imperial one.

~~~

The precise details of Helska’s joining the Stormcloak rebellion are unknown. There are certainly _stories_ on the subject, including the official one which I will now simply paraphrase as “Helska, now High Queen of all Skyrim, saw the divine righteousness of the Rebel cause and joined with it, that her Gift of seiðr might benefit it and the True King Ulfric.”

It would be reasonable to doubt the precise veracity of this statement. But whatever the truth _was_ at the time of Helska’s joining the Stormcloaks, it certainly true _now_ that she is proud to be Skyrim’s chosen Queen.


End file.
